Facebook Will Let People You Don't Know Message Your Inbox For $1

I think Facebook is on the right path with this as a potential money making idea.<p>However, they need some modifications if they don't want to piss off their users in implementing it.<p>Here's my suggestion(s):<p>Let users specify how much it should cost to contact them, and let them keep a percentage of every dollar over $1. Then let marketing messengers set a 'maximum cost' amount - if it's too costly, they won't send.<p>Don't want to be messaged? Set your price insanely high.<p>Don't mind being messaged as long as you get something out of it? Set it to $2-$5.<p>Win for everyone.

Direct Mail spam. Even if this is something some businesses will pay for, and even if it isn't a lot of messages, it is still an annoyance.<p>Would there be 1,000 businesses willing to spend $1 million each to send a message to a million people? That's $1 billion. Can messages be targeted enough and give a good enough ROI? Will users be pissed off and dismiss businesses that put ads into their private inbox?<p>More negatives than positives, IMHO..

Think of every company that has sent you at least three pieces of junk mail.<p>That's the barrier to entry imposed by a dollar on direct marketers.

So expensive, this would need to be targeted extraordinarily well for it to be worthwhile for advertisers. Which is possible, because fb knows so much more about you than even google.<p>When ads are targeted <i>well enough</i>, they stop being spam, and start becoming a welcome service. The question is whether they have reached that threshold.

This sounds just like a recently posted startup,<p>"Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook"<p><a href="https://www.gramicon.com/pages/howto" rel="nofollow">https://www.gramicon.com/pages/howto</a>

So Facebook implements an anti-spam measure that people have been clamoring for since the early days of slashdot and that makes them the bad guys?